Swarm robots can help control self driving cars

To help make self-driving vehicles safer and more flawless, the researchers have developed a decentralised algorithm with a collision-free, deadlock-free guarantee. “By understanding how to control our swarm robots to form shapes, we can understand how to control fleets of autonomous vehicles as they interact with each other,” said study lead author Michael Rubenstein from Northwestern University. A decentralised approach The advantage of a swarm of small robots -- versus one large robot or a swarm with one lead robot -- is the lack of a centralised control, which can quickly become a central point of failure. The robots interact locally to make decisions without global information,” Rubenstein said. In Rubenstein’s swarm, for example, 100 robots can coordinate to form a shape within a minute.